The “luck” part of that is minimal, so it’s best to forget about it and concentrate on the rest. Luckily, you can work on everything else on all once. While training your horse, the rider will be gaining Riding skill and a strong positive relationship with the horse too, increasing three factors right there.

When you’re ready to enter a competition, mount your horse, then click on the equestrian center. Select “Enter Competition…,” then choose from Racing, Jumping, or Cross-Country (which combines racing and jumping). Then, you get to select your level of competition among Beginner, Advanced, and International. Note that there is a minimum skill level required to get into any given competition strength, and the command will be grayed out if you’re below it. Once the order is given, you’ll ride over there and start the competition immediately.

Competitions are held at 5pm every Monday through Saturday, with no competitions held at all on Sunday. To maximize efficiency, try to actually be at the equestrian center at 5pm on the dot; if you are, you’ll actually have time to have two competitions rather than just one, doubling your income! Simply mount up and give a simple “Ride Here” command at the front steps of the equestrian center, then just hang out until 5pm. Keep track of how long it takes you to ride there form your home so you time the trip correctly.

When the competition starts, if you are controlling the rider or horse, you will see a large pop-up box that takes up the entire screen. This shows the horse’s position in the competition, as well as a dropdown box that allows you to select one of three strategies. Going at a steady pace ensures consistent results, but those results may be consistently low if your skills or moods are low. Selecting “Take Risks” or “Go For Broke” increases the chance you’ll gain some positions, but you’ll increase the chance of losing positions too. For the sake of consistent income, you may as well stick to a steady pace; only push it if you really, really want to win for some reason.

Typically, by the time you can get to a certain difficulty of a competition, your finishes will make more than the previous level’s wins. For example, winning a Beginner-class race will net you about $600. If you can even enter an Advanced-class race at all, you’ll probably make more than $600 with your finish unless you got unlucky and finished in the lower half of the field. If you’re going for profit, that means you should enter the next class of competition as soon as you possibly can.

Usually within ten days, assuming you did nothing but pure training and have no distractions, you can achieve level 8 or 9 in Riding and a chosen horse skill and be pulling in $1500 or more per competition ($3000 if you manage to show up early and get in a second competition) per day. There is no conventional job that will make you that much money, that fast, that consistently. Best of all, when the horse ages, you can sell it off for even more money or breed it, then start training the foal. Using the original rider—who by then will definitely have achieved level 10 in Riding—will be able to train the new horse that much faster and keep the money machine running!